Foreword

In Higher Education and Global Poverty, Christopher Collins adds to the sum of our knowledge about higher education and development. The foundational assumptions we bring to bear on difficult problems such as this are always telling. Christopher Collins’ clear-minded work is marked above all by its insights in relation to human agency and social development and hence its cultural sensitivity and respect for the Other. Respect for the Other is the premise of the study. It is also its conclusion, as it should be. It is the element that has often missing from development strategies, to the cost of those strategies and of the general good. Yet it is the element that is most crucial to working in a diverse and interdependent single world. Do any ever of us any longer believe that we have all the answers and having nothing to learn from traditions different to our own? As Lila Watson puts it in that beautiful quote in chapter one, if you have come here to help then you are wasting your time. ‘But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together’. Mutuality, agency, diverse insights into the problems of humanity. That is the whole of it. And so, in communicative debate and